Saturday

Feb 24, 2018 at 6:24 AMFeb 26, 2018 at 11:14 AM

In a time of jarring and disturbing events, the prints of M.C. Escher reassure with the order and humanity that underlie their strangeness. The popular 20th century Dutch artist rarely has been showcased by art museums, though his works have inspired rock musicians, visual perception psychologists, mathematicians and a broad public. That changes with the exhibit “M.C. Escher: Infinite Dimensions” at the Museum of Fine Arts.

“Institutions haven’t been keen on him, and I wasn’t either at first,” said curator Ronni Baer. “But he was a master printmaker with fantastic imagination and obsessions. How can we not consider him an artist? I’m full of appreciation now.”

Through 50 works, the exhibit explores his fascination with tessellations - repeated shapes that interlock and challenge perception, as well as his interest in the relativity of perspective, transformations, and reflections. Although the works often appear surreal, they reveal on closer look the connections between living things and the continuous life cycle. From the playful to the serious, they intrigue and entertain.

“Escher said his work was ‘serious playfulness,’ but I think it’s also playful seriousness,” Baer said.

Despite his unconventionality, Maurits Cornelis Escher, who died at age 74 in 1972, carried on the Dutch traditions of portrait, still life and landscape painting. In a fascinating self-portrait “Hand with Reflecting Sphere,” a large hand holds a clear glass globe that reflects and distorts his face and penetrating gaze as he sits in the living room of his Roman apartment. In the early 15th century, artists represented themselves in curved glass surfaces.

Like the works of painter Salvador Dali, some have a dream-like bizarreness and alternate reality, which have appealed to rock musicians, college students, psychedelic experimenters and creative thinkers. In “Bond of Union,” a female and a male head – each made of ribbon-like bands – float next to each other, their forehead bands interlocked. English musician Ian Hunter used that image in his solo album cover, and his band, Mott the Hoople, made an album cover of “Reptiles,” where small alligators rise from a two-dimensional drawing, climb onto a three-dimensional zoology book and other desk objects, lets out a snort, and crawl back to the page. Both album covers are on view next to Escher’s prints.

“I guess it’s the mixture of originality, artistry, geometry and a Dali-like sense of ‘anything goes’ that attracts,” Hunter said in the wall text. “The picture actually looks like someone in the act of creation to me. Go figure.”

Inspired by mathematical principles, Escher was obsessed with tessellation, creating 137 drawings, of which four are on view. They show a geometric grid with a pattern of fish, birds and frogs, which requires the brain to readjust vision from the dominant to less dominant images and illustrates the mathematical concept of translation symmetry. In the hexagon lithograph “Verbum,” black and white triangles morph into birds, fish and frogs against contrasting and symmetrical black and white backgrounds of earth, sky and water. The only one of his prints to hang in his studio, “Verbum” – whose title is Latin for ‘word’ and refers to the ‘word’ that begins the Bible’s story of creation – can be seen to express the unity of all things.

With similar images of transformation, “Metamorphosis II” is a 13-foot woodcut that starts and ends with the same maze and morphs from chessboard, tessellated lizards, bees, hives, fish, cubes and an Italian village with a chess piece tower.

In several disorienting prints which Escher called “impossible buildings,” elements defy gravity and other rules of physics. In the lithograph “Belveder,” a ladder, for example, is both inside and outside a house wall, and in “Relativity,” figures appear to walk on walls and ceilings.

In the darkest work of the exhibit, “Ascending and Descending,” faceless drones walk up and down rooftop stairs in seemingly purposeless motion, while two lone and separate figures stand and sit below. To Harvard University history professor Peter Gordon, it’s an allegory for the devaluation of the individual and dehumanization of totalitarianism.

Recognizing Escher’s mass appeal, Baer asked cellist Yo-Yo Ma, theater director Diane Paulus, chef Barbara Lynch and other artists, designers and scientists to select a work they liked and write about its meaning for them. In the exhibit section “Reflections,” their words accompany prints that are among Baer’s favorites.

“They’re lyrical and beautiful and have such artistry,” Baer said.

The dazzling linocut “Rippled Surfaces,” shows water that ripples with ellipses and reflects a full moon and bare tree branches, and “Three Worlds” floats a carpet of leaves on water that reflects three trees above and reveals a koi below.

Astronaut Nicole Stott wrote, “Escher’s Three Worlds is like seeing the Earth from space, encouraging us to understand the harmony and complexity of our home from a completely new vantage point.”

In these times of discord, the exhibit is a welcome reminder that harmony can exist.